The landmark San Francisco Chronicle building sits like a grizzled old cinder block at 901 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103. It's squat and bulky and desperately needs a paint job and a deep colon cleanse and some shrubbery. Do you want to see it?

Do you want to see its cluttered rooftop and see all the buildings surrounding it and zoom in to the point where you can, if you squint just right, see various cars in the street and the giant parking garage next door and to where you can almost, if you get a good magnifying glass, observe various sunlight-deprived writers and editors milling about Mission Street smoking cigarettes and discussing how to win more Pulitzers?

Because now, of course, you can. Just click here. Be sure to move the slider on the left all the way up. Boom. There we are.

Alamo Square Park? That's right in my neighborhood. Very famous, in lots of postcards. Here's a nearby address. (It's a B&B.) Click it. Use the slider on the left to zoom all the way up. See the green patch? That's the park. Look closely and you can almost see the people strolling, the dogs frolicking, the slackers slacking. I walk through that park almost every day. Isn't that cool? Isn't that weird?

My favorite coffee shop? Right here. The best place to buy dildos in the City? Right here. Danielle Steele's monstrous mansion? You got it. I had sex in a parked car once right on this corner. Easiest street on which to buy pot? Well, duh. I could, of course, go on.

This is where we are right now. This is Google's much-hyped and strangely provocative new satellite mapping service (a result of their latest acquisition, Keyhole), part of the company's aggressive rollout of Google Maps that lets you type in almost any address in the nation and pull up a remarkably detailed satellite shot of that area and zoom into it with ominous CIA-like precision (not as frighteningly close as TerraServer's USGS maps, but far more comprehensive), and of course this means you can type in the address of your ex and see his street and see his building and imagine him walking in and out of his front door and then imagine him suddenly spontaneously combusting and exploding into a million tiny painful screaming bits for what he did to you back in college goddammit, and it is at once satisfying and bizarre and totally unnecessary. But in a totally fascinating way.

And if you're like me, you see these shots and you squint and you say, dammit, just one or two more focal lengths of zoom power and I could really see what the hell's going on and what my neighbors are building in their backyard and whether that weird Jamaican restaurant next door that never ever seems to have any patrons is really a front for a badass drug cartel, and how can I get me a slice of that action, and this is when it hits you.

This is when you say to yourself, holy crap, if happy semi-innocuous little Google is offering satellite shots this good and this detailed free to the populace, if this sort of tech has reached the mainstream, just imagine how far the government has gone. Just imagine their photos. Ten times more powerful? One hundred times? No doubt. Not to mention all manner of listening devices, sniffers and e-mail tracers and Gonzalez-approved soul-sucking top-secret all-knowing Roving Eyes. Patriot Act II, anyone? Look up and wave to the dark dreary ominous satellites, honey. And then give Big Brother the finger.

Does it make you feel just a little woozy to know that Keyhole, the company that made the satellite lookup service possible, was initially funded by the CIA? Because, well, maybe it should.

Know this: Google is the new Microsoft. This is the word. They are carefully and calmly aiming to be so insanely powerful and so deeply integrated into your everyday e-life that you won't be able to open your refrigerator without first searching for "leftover pizza" on a Google window in the fridge door. Google's thirtysomething geek-boy founders are already billionaires. Already strategizing on how to rule the e-world. And Bill Gates is so very 1992.

Not to mention how, whereas the toxic Redmond leviathan worked like a thuggish demon to monopolize -- and in many ways worsen to the point of savage screaming pain -- your desktop experience, Google is aiming to control your need for information, your personal data and e-mail usage and cookie profiles and credit card databases and search data and maps of your house. Just, you know, for future reference.

Sure, sure, privacy concerns over Google's satellite thing are sort of unfounded, when you think about it, not much you can really do with those satellite shots, of course, most of which are at least six months to a year old anyway, even though it seems now weirdly easy to track down people after you've Googled their name and address and credit report and every scrap of data ever written by or about them, like, ever.

But still, it's one thing to have to study a regular map and read actual directions to get someplace, but quite another to actually see a photograph of the block, the street, the damn building itself, anytime you want, zoom in, zoom out, play God, play B-2 bomber. There's just something about actually seeing the street/building that adds a dimension of potent voyeurism to the mix. It feels a little, you know, soiled. Invasive. Intimate. Stalkeresque. And, as such, totally addictive. Which is exactly why Americans will love it.

It's true. We love this crap. We love our rampant fascinating mildly disturbing technology even if we barely comprehend what the hell we're doing and even if we can't imagine all the ramifications and insinuations and implications and even all the stuff we know they're already doing with it.

Which is to say, we are just all too willing to click on through in blissful ignorance of how the government is leveraging the same technology in far more sinister and unsettling ways, choosing to block out the fact that they can probably zoom all the way in and tell you the color of your shoes and x-ray your goddamn house and watch you shower and pick your nose and scarf down two giant bags of Salt and Fresh Ground Pepper Kettle Chips and a fistful of Xanax and a case of Corona while watching "America's Next Top Model" and neglecting to pay your taxes while your roomfuls of hydroponic pot grow like a verdant garden of love in the basement.